Application of Deterministic and AI-Based Methods to Accelerate the Component-Level Development Process in Electric Vehicles

The global automotive landscape is undergoing a significant paradigm shift driven by the rapid development cycles of emerging competitors, leaving traditional European OEMs with a critical time-to-market gap. To bridge this gap, automotive engineering must pivot from traditional hardware-based processes toward agile, digital data-driven methodologies. This paper presents a comprehensive feasibility study on the implementation of data-centric approaches, using both Artificial Intelligence and deterministic methodologies, with focus on accelerating component development. It provides a detailed assessment of various AI-based and deterministic methodologies at specific stages of the product development process, targeting both: 1. Product design 2. Product development process The aim is to enhance component-level performance, quality, and functionality, while simultaneously optimizing workflows, increasing process and development efficiency, and facilitating knowledge reuse throughout the development process. Beyond individual method evaluation, the study examines how deterministic and AI-based approaches can be integrated into automated development workflows. Furthermore, a formal ontology is constructed to facilitate a lessons-learned framework, ensuring that newly acquired insights from component development are systematically captured and preserved for future iteration loops. This ontology works hand in hand with automation by serving as the semantic foundation for automated design and validation routines. By integrating structured knowledge with automated workflows, the framework allows for autonomous application of historical insights to current design parameters, streamlining the decision-making process. This semantic structure prevents the loss of critical engineering knowledge and enables continuous AI-assisted improvement across different vehicle generations. The study concludes that this integrated data-framework provides a technically viable pathway to compress development timelines, enabling European OEMs to match the competitive speed of the global market while maintaining high standards of quality, functionality and safety. The proposed use cases are evaluated for feasibility using the high-voltage wiring harness as a representative enabling component, serving as a practical validation example for the presented methodologies.